Jim Holt

You know, the atom, which was thought to be very, very tiny, and you couldn't cut it any further.

It was the limit to this, you know, splitting process.

And as we know all too well from the 20th century, you can split an atom.

Yeah, it has pretty interesting consequences.

But we also discover the atom is almost entirely empty space.

Huh.

If you took a baseball and put it in the middle of Madison Square Garden, that would be like the nucleus.

And the first level of electrons are as far away as the exterior of the garden.

Yeah, why don't I fall through the floor here?

Because the floor is mostly empty space and I'm mostly empty space.

That too, if you look at it in the micro level, this apparent solidity,

is the product of a purely mathematical relation.

No.

It basically comes down to a pair of mathematical relations, the Pauli exclusion principle and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

I mean, all of this gets very abstract.

And here's a...

It's a slightly different way of putting that.

Well, if you study quantum field theory, which is what all physics graduate students begin with in graduate school, you discover that even particles are unreal.

They're just temporary properties of what are called fields.

And fields are just distributions of mathematical quantities through space-time.